Rehoboth Journal; Fearful Namibian Tribe Raises Flag of Freedom

By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN, Special to The New York Times

Published: April 4, 1990

REHOBOTH, Namibia—
Johannes Gerard Adolph Diergaardt likes to tell how his pioneer forebears wandered across the desert 120 years ago to found the community that he now heads.

It is a historical drama familiar to white Afrikaners who trace their roots to the Boer pioneers who made similar treks by oxcart from the lush Cape into the African interior.

But Hans Diergaardt, as he calls himself, is a Namibian of mixed race, and ''kaptein,'' or headman, of the Basters, who left the Cape to escape racial discrimination and oppression by whites and now claim to be similarly threatened by Namibia's new black majority Government.

The Basters, the clannish, Afrikaans-speaking offspring of liaisons between 18th-century Dutch or French immigrants and indigenous Khoi women in the Cape Colony, take a stubborn pride in their name, a corruption of ''bastard,'' and in their traditional autonomy.

Fears of Confiscation

Mr. Diergaardt has warned them that their land may be confiscated by the Government and redistributed to blacks from heavily populated northern Namibia. Before that happens, Mr. Diergaardt says, the Basters would secede from Namibia. They have weapons to defend themselves, he says, ''not automatic ones, but guns, yes.''

His fanciful plans have included making Rehoboth, which sits smack in the middle of Namibia, self-sufficient by buying up land to create a desert corridor 175 miles long to the South African-controlled enclave of Walvis Bay on the Atlantic Ocean. So far, however, his defiance consists mainly of flying the black, white and red Baster flag over Government offices in Rehoboth.

''I say it's very frustrating, and we know we've got no friends, no friends at all, and we're fighting a long fight,'' the 62-year-old Mr. Diergaardt said in an interview in his office here.

Taking his allies where he finds them, Mr. Diergaardt has made a bizarre alliance with the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, a right-wing paramilitary organization. The group promised to come to the aid of the Basters, though back home in South Africa it espouses a doctrine of white racial supremacy that logically would consign Mr. Diergaardt and his followers to the servants' quarters of apartheid.

A Puzzle for Namibia

The Namibian Government does not quite know how to respond to this first challenge of its authority. Some officials would consider Mr. Diergaardt merely an irritant but for the vulnerability of the new nation, which has barely a couple of hundred men under arms. Rather than have to quell a domestic insurrection, Namibian officials hope the Baster problem will fade away.

''Maybe the situation in Rehoboth would not need force; it would only need negotiation,'' Hifikepunye Pohamba, the Minister of Home Affairs, told journalists wistfully.

The Basters, who number only 32,000 people out of a total Namibian population of 1.3 million, inhabit an arid territory roughly the size of Israel. The parched scrubland cannot support everyone, so more than half of the men work as skilled artisans in Windhoek or elsewhere and remit money home. But the Basters tend to intermarry among their own and view outsiders with suspicion.

As colonial powers, Germany and later South Africa failed to crush the stubborn Basters and let Rehoboth operate by its own patriarchal laws written into a 1872 Constitution. This served the interests of the South African authorities, who divided Namibians into 11 groups based upon racial or tribal differences to rule them more easily.

These 11 regional administrations were scrapped by the United Nations in its independence timetable for Namibia. But the Basters say their regional government was in place before the others were created and should not have been ended.

Mr. Diergaardt said he did not get along with the South Africans and he does not trust their successors in Windhoek either. He told his people that the Ovambos, who make up more than half of the Namibian population and predominate in the Government, covet the quarter million acres owned by the Basters. In fact, the new Government has backed away from the old calls for land redistribution made by the South-West Africa People's Organization during its armed resistance to South African rule.

If it came to redistributing Namibia's resources, Mr. Diergaardt said, ''no one in Rehoboth believes this land is going to go to any man of Rehoboth.''

''It's going to go to an Ovambo-speaking citizen.''

Some Basters Disagree

Though Mr. Diergaardt has been the elected headman of the Basters for 10 years, not all of them support his defiance of central authority. Older Basters may look to their unique heritage, but many young people think it makes more sense to belong to Namibia.

For all the implied threats of independence, Mr. Diergaardt admitted that he would welcome some compromise with the Government in Windhoek, only 50 miles away, that would afford the Basters the kind of minority protection that whites in South Africa say they want. The individual rights enshrined in Namibia's Constitution do not satisfy him.

''We're not standing in the way of the Namibian Government taking over some things like the educational system and courts,'' Mr. Diergaardt said. ''But the right to decide on the land is not negotiable.''

''We're saying, let's talk,'' he said. ''We'll gladly accept you are the Government, but let's talk.''

Photo: Basters, Afrikaans-speaking Namibians of mixed race, number 32,000 people out of a total Namibian population of 1.3 million. They take a stubborn pride in their name, a corruption of ''bastard,'' and in their traditional autonomy, which they celebrated last week in Rehoboth. (The New York Times/Chris Wren)